Marie said:
Haven't plumbed the mystery of gedcoms yet, particularly for Macs...
The first time I received a big mysterious gedcom file from a friend, I could make neither head nor tail of it, literally, since I couldn't figure out where it started and where it ended. Fortunately, that initial state of confusion didn't last for long, and I now think of gedcoms as the greatest invention since sliced bread. They're so light-weight that you can attach them to emails in the hope that your receiver will know how to handle them, which is unfortunately not always the case.
Macintosh users have the advantage of being able to get totally involved in the gedcom phenomenon by means of the extraordinarily well-developed GEDitCOM tool, which actually uses the gedcom format for its internal data structures. What I am saying about GEDitCOM might look like a shameless plug, but I truly have no contacts of any kind with the brilliant fellow from Utah, if I remember correctly) who built this software, Having worked on Macs ever since 1984 (and written a book on this subject), I've rarely seen a simple product, in any domain whatsoever, of such high quality from a user-friendliness viewpoint. You can actually exploit GEDitCOM to test the validity of gedcom files exported by other tools, from non-Mac platforms.
These remarks might prove useful to Marie and others, but I do not wish to start any kind of war about genealogy tools.
William
